Was Nagasaki the greater U.S. sin?

Great Debates
141

Was re-reading Dissonance’s reply to your quote, and it made me wonder about other moral questions about wartime actions at that time. Specifically, would it have been just for the Allies to use chemical weapons in the Pacific on heavily fortified installations like Iwo Jima or parts of Okinawa? In the case of Iwo, the occupants were, IIRC, exclusively military, which was obviously not the case for Okinawa.

Would it even have been effective, especially as the Allies had not invented nerve gas at that point, so would have been limited to chlorine, phosgene, mustard, and perhaps HCN as well? Given that roughly as many lives were saved by having Iwo’s runways as were lost taking it, attacking Iwo still was a marginally good idea. But it would have been nice for the Allies to not have suffered nearly 7,000 killed and over 19,000 wounded. In his memoirs, Stanley Lovell, Director of R&D for the OSS, felt that a great opportunity had been missed to take the island with minimal casualties. The portion of the article (itself part of the History of the U.S. Marine Corps in WW II, Volume 4, Western Pacific Operations, (.pdf) at page 612) where the cite occurs, goes into some detail about the pluses and minuses of using chemicals, as well as the debate within the upper levels of the Joint Chiefs and the White House concerning their use.. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists naturally disagrees with the idea that using chemicals (or any WMD probably, given their slant) would have been effective.

I mention Iwo because at that point, the Japanese were incapable of effectively retaliating with those weapons at that site. (Which is the real reason NBC weapons in the present day have predominantly only been used against a power that cannot retaliate with them. Though I think Iran and Iraq used them against each other during their long war, though not against each others’ cities, interestingly.) Granted, had Olympic and Coronet occurred, the Japanese would have felt free to use them on their own soil, and that would have only added to the misery for the Allies. No doubt the Allies had that in mind when deciding not to use chemicals in the Pacific.

Morally, is using chemical weapons against soldiers that much worse than firebombing entire cities?

142

That would essentially be by answer. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place during a war that was already being fought by other means and helped bring it to a close. While relations between Israel and most of its neighbours are tense and often hostile, there’s no actual war going on. So the continuation of the current “cold war” situation is better than the deaths caused by a nuclear attack.

143

I’m with Dissonance, I’m not sure I can do this again, so soon after we just did several threads recently. Also unfortunately, I’ve got to get up in a few hours, and try to get some sleep in between so I’m going to just make some quick posts which will – also unfortunately – be overly brisk as I don’t have time to soften them.

Rubbish.

The moral justification for the use of the nuclear weapons and firebombings comes from the Japanese attacks on and killings of civilians in the counties it occupied.

Although it’s impossible to separate the two, many histories argue that the affect of the Soviet entry into the war was the more important. It certainly was of extreme importance and played a role which the bombings were unable to. That is, it destroyed the key argument of hoping for the Soviets to intercede which the never-say-surrender army and factions within the IJN were using as a stall tactic. The IJA was prepared to sacrifice the whole country so the bombings didn’t phase them.

Started off really well, but then the went south with the anti-aircraft comment which isn’t historical.

I’ll add that any questioning not waiting is simply Monday morning quarterbacking, and quite likely incorrect speculation. While I argue above that the entry of the USSR was likely more important to break the military’s stalling, it did not cause an immediate surrender.

Yes indeed.

Quoted for truth and as a rare exception to the complaint directly above.

The US was headed into a war with Japan, and was making active preparation, with the majority of people believing that there would be war between the two countries.

But became more earnest after Germany’s defeat.

And that’s all for tonight.

144

… so, you know how I said earlier that people from the past were monumental arseholes ? Christ.
Anyway, thanks to the both of you for fighting my rank ignorance.

[QUOTE=Gray Ghost]
Morally, is using chemical weapons against soldiers that much worse than firebombing entire cities?
[/QUOTE]

Not really, no.
But then again, once you’ve resorted to dropping white phosphorus on civilians - on people period (I don’t care how bad a person you are, nobody deserves WP), what else is there ? What dimension of “worse” can there really be ?

145

Suppose further, that Israel buys a substantial nuclear arsenal from the U.S. and now had the fire-power to wipe out their enemies in a pre-emptive strike with a small number of casualties on their side. Would they be justified in do so?

146

One of the definitions of “World War” is the participation of all World Powers.

Remember, the bombs saved lives. Not only American lives- Japanese lives. The invasion had been estimated that conquering Japan would cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000–800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities. Even if we hadn’t invaded, bombing them would have resulted in the deaths of millions of Japanese, thousands of Americans, tens of thousands of Chinese, and thousands of Allied POWs. Starving them out, via naval blockage would have been worse, with the deaths of all POWs.

We also have to remember, that in 1945 victory was not nessesarily thought to be inevitable by the Allies and the Bomb was “just another weapon” there was no reason not to use it. True, later, after it was discovered that Nuclear War might result in the destruction of Civilization, then any use of “nukes’ became unthinkable.

147

In my opinion, no. I understand that any country is going to give priority to its own people above that they give to people in other countries but I don’t feel you can ignore those other people in deciding a moral issue. So I don’t feel it would be moral for any country to just dismiss the deaths caused by their acts as long as the people who die are foreigners.

148

I think the participation of several is sufficient. What defines it as a “world war” is that it spans several continents. The Eighty Years’ War is considered the first such in modern times – combatants included the Netherlands, England, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire; but not any of the other great powers of the time, not France, Portugal, Poland-Lithuania, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the Mughal Empire, or China.

149

In order for MacArthur to grant immunity to anyone, Japan had to have surrendered “first”. MacArthur was appointed the Supreme Commander of/for the Allied Powers and became the Military Governor of Japan on V-J day.

Both atom bombs were dropped on Japan because Imperial Japanese forces would not surrender. The decision to drop these bombs was based on ending the war quickly.

150

  1. Israel has a substantial nuclear arsenal

  2. It built it in house (cough… according to foreign publications!)

  3. The US does not sell nuclear weapon, certainly not to non-nuclear powers. Among other things it would violate the NNPT.

  4. You should already know this from reading your own thread “It’s Absurd to Have the Right To Start a Pre-emptive War” which is where this comment would make slightly more sense rather than in this thread as a non sequitur.

151

Well, there was that death march from the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. Before that there was the Rape of Nanjing in 1937. Imperial Japans treatment (beatings, starvation, murder) of POWs and civilian prisoners including children and women should certainly be considered.

Or are you only considering U.S. or the Allies actions when trying to define “worse”?

152

Not to mention:

Human experimentation and biological warfare, with Unit 731.
Use of chemical weapons.
Cannibalism
Slavery. Mass rape.

And so forth.

153

Yeah, that could never happen in the US.

154

… well, yes, as a matter of fact I would indeed consider subjecting a human being, let alone hundreds of thousands of them, to burning alive via white phosphorus (or even more horrifying, surviving that…) as strictly worse than beatings, malnutrition or even a forced march through the jungle. Guess I’m just morally bankrupt that way.

Beyond that, do you *really *want to hang your morally superior hat on the treatment of Japanese POWs and occupied civilians ? Seriously ? Because let me tell you, you’re in for some bitter disappointment and/or aghast horror should you ever crack open a book on the subject…
Not just in the Pacific, for that matter (although to be fair, compared to American attitudes towards the Japanese, the Germans had it almost easy. Of course, the Russians and French made up for that in spades…)

I’ll say it again: people back then were assholes. No exceptions. I mean that.

155

Implied in your statement is that people nowadays are not assholes. What is it that makes Bertrand Russell or Jeannette Rankin assholes but Barack Obama or Derrick Miller not?

156

I guess you’re right? Bataan was just another “forced march through the jungle” Probably not worth a 2nd thought when the topic is heating Nagasaki to a few thousand degrees. Other’s might consider eight years of Imperial Japanese attrocities to be a serious matter. Ten to twenty million civilian dead in China. Why. Imperial Japanese expansion policy. Somewhere between half million to a million civilian dead in the Philippines. Why? Was that wacky, fun-loving, Japanese military just killing time instead of people?

When the bullets are flying and people are dying on a “world war” scale, is it better to end the world war quickly or ???

Perhaps you would recommend surrendering to Imperial forces or Nazi SS? That didn’t seem to end very well for millions of people.

157

What ? No ! Of course we’re still assholes.
But marginally less so.

I dare hope that, due to a number of factors, and despite the strong animosity that exists on the ground, if today in Afghanistan a Marine went “You know what, I’m gonna cut off the head of that insurgent we killed, and then I’m going to skeletonize it, and then I’m going to use it as an ashtray, maybe send it back to my folks back home”, it would beget at least a “*Dude *!” from fellow Marines. Similarly, had Obama (or Bush) planned on deliberately starving Iraq or Lybia until their respective dictators surrendered peacefully, I expect a few eyebrows could have been raised.
As for Derrick Miller, do note that he was duly prosecuted and got life over killing one civilian - contrast to WW2-era (or even Viet-Nam era) attitudes towards shooting POWs and civilians, which was for the most part to sweep it under the rug and censor reports of it because there was a war to win dammit.

Maybe we’re the insane ones for expecting war to be prosecuted “humanely” (or believing our own bullshit on this), though. I often think that our expecting soldiers to behave “professionally”, to kill without hate and so forth, is eminently dysfunctional.

But I’ll say it again, if in terms of “absolute morality” (yes, I know that doesn’t exist, bear with me) the modern man is clearly and unequivocally a step up from the past man, and while my characterizing them as assholes implies a value judgement from the current baseline/referential, from *theirs *it wasn’t necessarily the case.
Life was harder back then ; society, world order and the mental frameworks derived from it were eminently more fucked up and more inherently injust ; the poor sods who fought the war were absolutely not prepared for what they were told to do ; their behaviour was absolutely influenced by an atmosphere of entrenched racism and dehumanizing of the Other… and so forth.
In short, I don’t *blame *them for being assholes. It’s an exceptional man who wouldn’t have been an asshole then - such as Bertrand Russell. But I can still recognize that they were. Hell, it can certainly be argued that it’s *because *they were monumental assholes that we aren… are less so.

And doorhinge, you know what, I’m just not interested in having this discussion with you. You seem to believe that doing horrible things to horrible people is, in fact, not horrible. Let’s just say we strongly disagree on this.
Historian John W. Dower wrote of the efforts of modern Japanese neo-nationalists to whitewash the crimes of Imperial Japan by pointing out those committed by the Allies and the shortcomings of the Tokyo trials, that they were “a kind of historiographic cancellation of immorality—as if the transgressions of others exonerate one’s own crimes”.
And it is absolutely correct. But of course, that cuts both ways.

158

Starving out Britain was the whole point of the U-Boat campaign in the Atlantic, though it was thankfully unsuccessful. The blockade of Germany in WW1 was slowly starving them out as well. Starving out besieged cities and catapulting dead animals and bodies over the wall to spread disease is an age old tactic. It’s nice to imagine that we really are more enlightened people today; but don’t fool yourself for a minute that the leaders of both your country and mine would have let fly every nuclear missile and warhead they had into Eastern Europe and the USSR had the balloon gone up during the Cold War causing devastation on a scale that would have made WW2 look like child’s play. No doubt both sides would have tried to keep the fighting conventional for as long as possible, but it would not have been long before one side or the other requested the release of tactical nuclear weapons, and the step from that to a full scale strategic exchange is a very, very small one.

Please, please, please tell me you’re not relying on the numbers provided by James Bacque in those cites. The man is a certifiable conspiracy crackpot and nut job. He’s been espousing thoroughly discredited conspiratorial nonsense that up to a million or more German POWs died in captivity and it was covered up since the publication of Other Losses in 1989. From your first cite:

From the criticism section of Other Losses:

I’m sure you’re aware though that mutilation of the enemy dead was common practice on both sides in the Pacific War. War is always madness, insanity and horror even at its ‘best’, and I use the word best very lightly.

159

Oh, I don’t. But I do derive a small amount of hope from the fact that the balloon failed to go up.
Or else, what’s the point ?

No, I’m not. I’m not the brightest bulb in the shed, but when published estimates go “1000”; “3000”; “OK, 6000, tops”; “1.000.000 !!!”, I still go :dubious::).

However, the strict number of fatalities is less “interesting” (I struggle to find the right word here) to me than the conditions and attitudes involved, which aren’t disputed - that German POWs and civilians were being deliberately underfed, were kept throughout winter in “camps” that consisted only in a barbed wire fence, and that they were used as forced labour (including in ad hoc mine clearing, or arduous physical work regardless of their health).
From a strict moral standpoint, does it really matter if the piles of corpses that resulted from those practices, after the war was over no less, isn’t quite as towering as the one resulting from 8 years of same ? “Not as bad as” really doesn’t cut it when the charge is “bad !”

Yes. I did say “No exceptions”, didn’t I ?
But that’s sort of my point. Whitewashing the horrors our own side committed, or attempting to handwave them away through “they were worse !!!” is thoroughly unhealthy IMO. Particularly in cases where they specifically weren’t.

160

You are absolutely wrong and this is whitewash coming from the other side, the stuff the Japanese have been spreading: “Oh the Americans forced us into attacking them!” :rolleyes: “Oh, The Americans also had excesses, so our are not so bad.”:rolleyes:

There are two huge differences:
First is scale. The scale of the warcrimes committed by the Axis in WWII is more thna a order of magnitude over the Allies.

Next is accountability: The Axis warcrimes were mostly ordered at the top.

Yes, the Allies had a few, such as Marines mutilating enemy dead. BUT, not only wasn’t this approved of or ordered, once the High Command found out it was widespread, orders went out to stop it.